Monthly Archives: September 2018

Careers in science: Research management

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Given constraints on independent positions across India’s scientific institutions, a new career option — research management — beckons PhD degree holders, says our guest blogger and seasoned research management consultant Savita Ayyar.

Backed by a decade of research management experience at Wellcome Trust London and National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, Savita says attractive remuneration makes this  profession a good alternative for scientists keen on exploring a non-academic research-related career.

Savita Ayyar

No more a lonely path

Nobel Laureate Sir John Gurdon’s elegant experiments in 1958, transplanting whole nuclei into frog eggs, have laid the ground for much of our current thinking in the field of stem cell research. While the same spirit of enquiry and joy of experimentation still exists in research today, the current generation of scientists have to grapple with a far more complex research environment. Researchers have to master the art of raising and managing funds from diverse sources, navigating ethical considerations around research, doing ‘team science’ in large consortia, scrutinising research impact and translating basic research to benefit society.

The good news is that scientists don’t need to walk this path alone. A new army of ‘research managers’ offer that helping hand needed to facilitate their science. These research managers juggle work across several fields and help researchers navigate a labyrinth of processes and details, making modern research possible.

Research management has evolved as a profession over several decades. The need for this profession arose from institutional needs to manage a diversity of research awards. It has continued to develop in response to the changing international funding landscape1. Many research-intensive organisations worldwide have research offices catering to the needs of both individual researchers and institutions. Research managers and administrators play key roles in such offices, working proactively to manage a gamut of processes enabling external research funding. Success in this field hinges upon helping researchers make optimal use of all available opportunities while minimising risk to institutions.

So, what are the key skills that could make you an effective research manager?

• It’s a combination of professional skills, personal attributes and an enabling environment.
• A broad-based background in science and administration, such as knowledge of funding agency processes, can significantly enhance a research manager’s reach.
• A natural flair for working with people, willingness to learn about new areas, attention to detail and strong organizational skills are crucial, as is an enabling institutional work environment that recognizes the value of facilitation.
• There is room here for a diversity of skills and interests, ranging from academic to administrative, all of which add value to the organization seeking to raise and manage external funding.

Research management in India

In India, science-led research management has taken wings in the last decade. The National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore was among the first to start a research development office in 2010 to support the external funding needs of a growing campus. The office was unusual for India, and quickly began growing a team of scientist administrators who facilitated research funding.

Several others such as the Translational Health Science and Technology Institute (THSTI), Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Pune, Centre for Stem Cell Research (CSCR) Vellore, National Centre for Cell Science (NCCS), Shiv Nadar University, Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI), Tata Translational Cancer Research Centre (TTCRC) and George Institute for Global Health (GIGH) have been recruiting research managers and building research offices. There is now a growing group of scientists in non-academic roles including grant management, scientific outreach, ethics and others, working alongside researchers, administrators and staff at external agencies to facilitate research at Indian institutions. Individuals with a first-hand understanding of the research process are taking up such roles, gaining professional acceptance from their academic peers and building trust-based working partnerships.

With attractive remunerations, the profession is also proving to be a good alternative for individuals with PhD degrees, who wish to develop their careers in non-academic research-related roles. This is particularly significant, given constraints on independent scientific positions across India’s scientific institutions. Such efforts have considerably expanded the scope of support available to researchers at these institutions, bringing in much needed links between science, external funding and societal engagement. There is now a growing awareness of the role of research management as a new and important element of India’s developing research ecosystem.

The road ahead

While these are welcome developments for Indian research, much of these efforts have been isolated. Research management is needed for science in India to progress and for Indian research institutions to be globally competitive. For it to secure firm footing in India, more institutions need to create such structures and research managers in India need to be trained with the requisite skills and to gather into a professional network that aids their career development.

Earlier this year, the Wellcome Trust/DBT India Alliance launched the India Research Management Initiative (IRMI) with workshops that brought research managers together to share their career stories and experiences (Linkedin page). The collective is designing online training courses and networking events. Indian research managers also participated at INORMS 2018, a large international conference, interacting with peers from 45 countries. These developments demonstrate the immense value of creating training and networking opportunities for current and future research management professionals in India.

So, what does the future hold for research managers in India? Science in India needs additional support from non-government sources such as industry and philanthropy. Research-intensive institutions would do well to have structures in place that allow their researchers to tap into diverse sources of funding with ease and clarity, participate in collaborative research and work to find solutions for national and global challenges. It is time India boosts its research ecosystem with research managers as academic support workforce. With good training and a supportive environment, this dynamic new profession is poised to make a welcome and significant change in the research landscape of the country.

Ref.
1. Langley, D. Perspectives: Policy and Practice in Higher Education. 16, 71-76 (2012) doi: 10.1080/13603108.2012.659289

(Savita Ayyar can be reached at sayyar@jaquarandatree.com. She tweets from @SavitaAyyar)

Suggested reading:

Research management: Priorities for science in India

Discovery relies on strong support staff

Away from home: Using science for societal good

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The ‘Away from home‘ blog series features promising young Indian postdocs working in foreign labs. They recount their experience of working in foreign lands, the triumphs and challenges, the cultural differences and what they miss about India. They also offer useful tips for other Indian postdocs headed abroad. You can join their online conversation using the #postdochat hashtag.

Our ‘Away from home’ interactive map features 50 bright Indian postdocs from around the world. Write to us at npgindia@nature.com to suggest names of postdocs from countries and disciplines we haven’t covered yet.

Saidulu Mattapally, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Biomedical Engineering at The University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA, is enamoured by the translational aspect of science. From exploring coronary genetic defects to unraveling the secrets locked in India’s traditional system of medicine, this molecular geneticist from Osmania University, Hyderabad, strives to do application-based science that has immediate benefits for people.

Saidulu Mattapally

Driven by the relevance of science

Molecular genetics is not just a fascinating field of science but also offers immediate medicinal applications. This therapeutic relevance triggered my early interest in the field. I tried to explore the molecular and hereditary premise of coronary illness in my graduate and doctoral studies.

Scientific investigation helps shape the broader questions we ask – for me an investigative approach is also a state of mind. From a young age, I have been inspired to think of the broader relevance of things. Science has been eternally interesting to me and I always wanted to be in research.

After a bachelor’s from Osmania University, Hyderabad, I got into a master’s course in genetics at the same university learning advanced experimental techniques in molecular biology, biochemistry, immunology and genetics. I was selected as a research scientist in the pharmacology division of CSIR-Indian Institute of Chemical Technology, Hyderabad, one of the best chemical technology institutes in India.  My Ph.D. under Sanjay K. Banerjee at the same institute involved genetics (Sanger sequencing).

I also got the opportunity to work with Kumarasamy Thangaraj and Lalji Singh’s group at CSIR-Center for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), Hyderabad. They published two papers in Nature, which was a great learning experience.

Combining molecular genetic and pharmacology

Though my interest was in the molecular and genetic basis of congenital heart disease, I spent a year to learn advanced molecular genetic techniques. During this time I worked on a project exploring malaria risk among ancestral Indian tribal populations. We needed to collaborate with a hospital to get samples. Although CCMB scientists were helpful, doctors were not convinced except in one Hyderabad hospital, which gave us the opportunity to work with congenital heart disease samples.  My supervisor urged me to explore the work of two Indian origin scientists Deepak Srivastava and Aravinda Chakravarti. We wrote a grant on their work for the Indian scenario, and although we didn’t get funded, we continued to work on the project.

During Ph.D., I got the opportunity to present this work at the prestigious international conferences of the American Society of Human Genetics in 2013 and 2014. There I met Aravinda Chakravarti, the scientist who had influenced my project. Around the same time, I got an opportunity to attend a next-generation sequencing event in Boston. There, I heard a lecture by Eric Topol, one of best-individualized medicine and genome and digital technologies researchers. A five-minute chat with him and later his book ‘The Creative Destruction of Medicine’ continue to inspire me.

I was also awarded a DBT travel grant in 2015 to attend the next American Society of Human Genetics meeting in San Diego. In addition to molecular biology and genetics, I learned an immense lot about pharmacology, development of different types of animal models to study different diseases, and pharmacological screening of small molecules. My doctoral stint had already convinced me of the strong relationship between molecular genetics and pharmacology.

During my doctoral stint with Dr. Banerjee, we traced a genetic mutation associated with congenital heart disease in south India. Our work shed light on a very important aspect of gene mutation as we reported a novel mutation associated with ventricular septal defect (VSD).

Postdoc years – when life and career intertwine

Around this time, my father and best friend Yellaiah Mattapally passed away when he fell from a toddy (palm) tree. He was a farmer and always talked about the problems he faced in his agricultural practices on account of being illiterate. He would always egg me on to become a scientist and work for the society.

Fulfilling my father’s dreams, I finished my Ph.D. in 2014. I got married the same year and received a postdoc opportunity from the University of Minnesota in Dr. Nobuaki Kikyo’s lab soon after. I decided to take my spouse along though we couldn’t go since my visa didn’t arrive in time. Following many ups and downs, one year later, I took up an offer from Dr. Jianyi (Jay) Zhang at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Our son was born that year.

In life as in a postdoc career, many problems come interspersed with solutions – and a lesson I learned was that one should be mentally prepared for these years when both personal and professional lives face a lot of changes. In the end, they work out fine.

As a postdoctoral student, I trained in CRISPR-Cas9 in skeletal muscle cells and mouse induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) culture. I studied how gene expression and epigenetic modification change during differentiation of mouse skeletal muscle cells. I have completed 3 years of post-doctoral work and hope to wrap it up by end of 2018. In the first year, I tested the hypothesis that fetal genes linked to congenital heart defects can treat adult heart failure (myocardial infarction). We reported the effectiveness of transplanted, human iPSC-derived cardiomyocytes in the treatment of ischemic myocardial injury. Currently, I am working on the development of universal human iPSC by CRISPR-cas9 mediated Knockout MHC class I and MHC class II expression. Also, the differentiation of these cells into three lineages – cardiomyocytes (iPSC-CM), endothelial cells (iPSC-EC) and smooth muscle cells (iPSC-SMC) – to treat myocardial infarction in swine.

Traditional knowledge needs more exploring

Though medical practice in India majorly involves western medicine, the Indian traditional system of medicine Ayurveda is now being practiced and accepted all over the globe.

I remember my mother Ankulamma treating abdominal pain with medicinal plants. She also talked of Ayurvedic formulations to treat chronic diseases such as diabetes.  In Telangana, where I was born, we celebrated the annual floral festival of Bathukamma, when we brothers brought home beautiful yellow flowers of the native tree Senna auriculata and other flowers for our sisters. Interestingly enough, when I recently started researching Ayurveda I learned that Senna auriculata is used for the treatment of diabetes and cardiovascular diseases.

I strongly feel that these traditional knowledge linkages need more scientific exploring.

During my undergraduate years, I used to help my father in our cotton and rice fields. I haven’t gone back to the fields in a long time. I wish to come back someday and work for my homeland, and dig deeper into the traditional knowledge wealth that India is so rich in.

SciArt scribbles: Coupling creation and analysis with collages

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Many scientists embrace the artistic medium to infuse new ideas into their scientific works. With science-art collaborations, both artists and scientists challenge their ways of thinking as well as the process of artistic and scientific inquiry. Can art hold a mirror to science? Can it help frame and answer uncomfortable questions about science: its practice and its impact on society? Do artistic practices inform science? In short, does art aid evidence?

Nature India’s blog series ‘SciArt Scribbles’ will try to answer some of these questions through the works of some brilliant Indian scientists and artists working at this novel intersection that offers limitless possibilities. You can follow this online conversation with #SciArtscribbles .

Neuroscientist Leslee Lazar dabbles in collages. A visiting faculty at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, Leslee’s research interests lie in neuroscience of design, science communication, cultural cognition and behavioural change. He combines his training as a neuroscientist with his passion as a collage artist to create what he calls a ‘hazy amalgam’ of creation and analysis.

Leslee Lazar{credit}Devarsh Barbhaya{/credit}

Collage needs just a few scraps of paper, some glue and not even a steady hand. But, this humble hobby has exalted origins, “invented” by great artists like Picasso and instrumental in the birth of modern art.

My own foray into collage was rather fortuitous – the only available slot in my high school cultural team was for the collage competition. Making the team meant skipping classes for two full days. So, I put my name in and made my first collage. To everybody’s surprise, I won a prize. I did not make more collages after that glorious start. Almost two decades later, I found myself falling back on collages to unwind from a stressful postdoc stint.

When I make or see collages, I switch to a ‘dual mode’, described beautifully by the polymath Vladimir Nabokov; “I cannot separate the aesthetic pleasure of seeing a butterfly and the scientific pleasure of knowing what it is”. As a cognitive neuroscientist, I study how we perceive visual artwork and how it gives us that special feeling when we look at it – the aesthetic emotion. However, my process of creating collages is not driven by scientific theories, its impulsive, urgent, chaotic and a meditative process.

For my collages, I extensively use images from internet photo archives. The power of collages is that I can manipulate an element of an image, like form, colour or perspective giving new meaning to the original image. Sometimes, just a juxtaposition of images from different eras or styles can create a powerful reinterpretation. In a series called Pro:Postures, I explored how body postures reflect subtle meanings. In vintage portrait photographs, I manipulated certain features to remove skin colour, expressions, markers of ethnicity, social background etc. — the attempt was to amplify meanings embedded in the posture of the person. Postures reflect many of our emotions and realities. Using these manipulated images, I was attempting to highlight how postures convey subtle aspects of history, gender, politics and power (Fig. 1)

Fig. 1: Two separate collages created out of vintage portrait photographs to show how postures convey subtle aspects of history, gender, politics and power.{credit}Leslee Lazar{/credit}

The technique of collage was invented by artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, when they were exploring ways to create spatial illusion in their art. They wanted to represent space from different perspectives. The painting could appear deep or shallow depending on where the viewer focused attention. To do this, they pasted textured wood and fabric on to their painting canvas, giving birth to collage. Soon, collage became an established method for western artists.  Of the many methods and means of collage, two kinds stand out – one that plays with our ability to group objects, detect patterns and relationships (called ‘gestalt’ perception) and the other that appeals to our inherent preference for human-like forms.

The first kind was made popular by artists like Hans Arp, who used shapes and arrangements to create forms and meanings. It exploits our visual system’s gestalt property. We give meanings to seemingly random stimuli, like the Dalmatian’s random white and dark patches in the famous collage where Arp is playing with composition. Many collages exploit this principle, much like other art, of deriving pleasure in “completing” a form.

The second kind of collages use the human form, especially the face. We can recognize faces effortlessly, read emotions, and communicate through expressions. In the brain, there is a special area to process visual information of faces. Any damage to this area and we lose the ability to recognize faces, made famous by Oliver Sack’s classic “Man who mistook his wife for a hat”. The way we process faces is different from other objects; it happens faster than objects and we read emotions before we register the identity of the face.

We also perceive faces holistically, which means we do not make mentally put the parts of the face, eyes, nose and ears together to recognise a face. Because the brain is set up to process face in such a way, it is prone to some illusions, like the Thatcher illusion, where inverted eyes and lips are perceived as normal when seen inverted. This special relationship with faces has been exploited in many artworks. In a collage I made in response to the treatment of Syrian war refugees in Europe, I used a stock image of European refugees from the past and manipulated their faces to represent the yearning for freedom and normal life (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2{credit}Leslee Lazar{/credit}

Although, art can evoke emotions purely by its visual features, there is also a strong cognitive, social and cultural element. Collage, with its borrowed imagery offers a ready-made way to contextualise art with pop and political reference. Some of the earliest collages were made in reaction to World War 1. Hannah Hoch used images of German Prime Minister and defence minister on an embroidered background as an anti-war statement.

Hannah Hoch’s anti-war collage {credit}Wikiart{/credit}

Collage also was influential in the pop art movement, an art movement with everyday objects, made famous by Andy Warhol’s painting of soup cans. However, the first pop art was a collage made with fashion magazines and sales catalogues.

A collage titled “Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?” by English artist Richard Hamilton is the first pop art.{credit}Wikiart{/credit}

The great art historian E. H Gombrich said “There really is no such thing as art, there are only artists”. And neuroscience claims that the artist is a neuroscientist. Will my training as a neuroscientist give me added insight into the artistic process? It’s too early to say, there is only a hazy amalgam of the two ways of thinking and interacting with the world. The forces that drive to create and to analyse are not necessarily opposite. I hope they merge into something greater than the sum of individuals. Till then, my collages will try to write visual poetry with other people’s words.

(Leslee Lazar can be contacted at leslee.lazar@gmail.com. He tweets from @leslee_lazar.)

Suggested reading:

SciArt scribbles: Technology to aid dance

SciArt scribbles: Music to tackle PhD blues

SciArt scribbles: Playing science out

Artists on science: scientists on art

Away from home: Doubling research fun with twin subjects

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The ‘Away from home‘ blog series features promising young Indian postdocs working in foreign labs. They recount their experience of working in foreign lands, the triumphs and challenges, the cultural differences and what they miss about India. They also offer useful tips for other Indian postdocs headed abroad. You can join their online conversation using the #postdochat hashtag.

Our ‘Away from home’ interactive map features 49 bright Indian postdocs from around the world. Write to us at npgindia@nature.com to suggest names of postdocs from countries and disciplines we haven’t covered yet.

Varun Warrier, a postdoctoral researcher at the Autism Research Centre in University of Cambridge, UK, talks about the beautiful marriage of genetics and neurosciences . And how he has come to combine these two complementary subjects to carve out a meaningful research career. An alumnus of the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), Bangalore, Varun works on the genetics of autism and related traits.

Varun Warrier

It helps to know what you don’t want to do

When I finished high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I knew what I didn’t want to do, and in retrospect, that was very helpful. I didn’t want to study engineering or medicine. I didn’t have the inclination for the former, and was too squeamish for the latter. I ended up pursuing a degree in zoology, something I was reasonably good at.

At the end of the three-year undergraduate programme, I was faced with exactly the opposite problem. I knew what I wanted to do, but had to make a choice. I was lucky enough to get a three-summer undergraduate fellowship at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), Bangalore. There, I worked with Anuranjan Anand on the genetics of stuttering. We searched for genetic regions linked to stuttering using an old genetic mapping technique called genetic linkage mapping. Many of the interesting genes were involved in brain development or neural signalling. I soon realized that I was as excited by neuroscience as genetics, and I had to decide between the two for my graduate programme. Since I already had some research experience in human genetics, I chose neuroscience for master’s at University College London (UCL).

People ask me if it was a big jump from zoology to neuroscience. I don’t think it was. The zoology degree was panoramic and, in effect, a life sciences degree. So, while some concepts like cognitive neurosciences were new, I was never completely at sea.

At UCL, I was required to conduct a 9-month research project. I was very much looking forward to this. Perhaps I wasn’t adventurous enough and ended up choosing a genetics project again! I worked on an extremely rare and debilitating childhood neurogenerative disease called Neuronal Ceroid Lipofuscinoses and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Coupling favourites

Towards the end of the project, when I had to make another choice, it came easy. I was enjoying the beautiful coming together of the two disciplines – neuroscience and genetics. I wanted to investigate research questions in neuroscience, using genetic methods. These silos are all a bit arbitrary though and don’t really matter too much. Once you start working on something, you’re likely to ‘borrow’ ideas from multiple fields.

It was this happy marriage of genetics and neuroscience that got me working with Simon Baron-Cohen at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom for an MPhil and a PhD. Getting into Simon’s lab was a matter of being at the right place at the right time. I had read some of Simon’s work, and wrote to him. I didn’t expect to get in. But as luck would have it, Simon had genetic data that needed to be analysed.

At Cambridge, I gradually pivoted towards human genomics, which required a lot of programming and statistics. I worked (and still do) on the genetics of traits related to autism, such as empathy, emotion recognition, and an interest in systems. People are surprised when I tell them of my work on the genetics of these traits – many don’t think something like empathy is genetic. But all human attributes are partly genetic despite what my sociologist friends will tell you.

Autism is complex, and no two autistic persons are alike. There are subgroups within the autism spectrum. Large scale genetic studies have had some success in subgrouping this spectrum by identifying variants in specific genes linked to specific syndromes. My most exciting research so far suggests that the two core domains of autism – social interaction difficulties (the social domain), and the unusually repetitive and restricted interests and behaviour (the non-social domain) – are genetically dissociable. I am not the first to suggest this as there have been a few studies to come to similar conclusions, but ours was the first to provide molecular genetic evidence in support of this hypothesis.

Choose your lab, supervisor well

So much of this journey has been made less arduous by very supportive and inspiring mentors and supervisors. When you don’t get along with your supervisor, your project can be extremely stressful. It’s always important to think carefully about doing a PhD, and finding the right supervisor. A PhD is always challenging, and it’s meant to be.  To paraphrase the author Jhumpa Lahiri, writing a novel is like jumping off a cliff and not knowing where you’re going to land. I think this is true of a PhD as well. Ideally, you’re doing something new and you’re never sure if you’re going to get it right. That for me was the most exciting aspect of the PhD.

When I embarked on doctoral research, I knew three years would be enough for me to decide whether to stay in academia or not. I found the PhD experience so enjoyable that I’ve decided to stay on at the University of Cambridge, and have transitioned into postdoctoral research.

The first few months as a postdoc were daunting. I guess the lack of a structured medium or long-term goal is difficult to get used to. I’m now used to the rhythm of a postdoc, and continue researching the genetics of autism and related traits.

Something that people don’t necessarily tell you but becomes quickly apparent is the number of rejections you get as an academic. Experiments fail, manuscripts are rejected, applications are unsuccessful. Perhaps this is true of all human endeavour, but I have nothing else to compare this to. I am still learning to develop a thick skin and take failures and rejection in my stride. But it’s not always a rejection – the intermittent successes are enormously exciting and make everything worthwhile.